Beyond Obama's Hope: the work of Shepard Fairey

Beyond Obama's Hope: the work of Shepard Fairey

The artist who created the iconic 2008 poster of the US president talks us through that and other key works. Shepard Fairey's exhibition, Sound & Vision, is showing at
The Old Truman Brewery, London, from 19 October – 4 November 2012

Hope (2008)

“Obama hasn’t done as well as I hoped, but I created the poster with the understanding that people in office can only achieve so much. I originally made it just as a grassroots thing, and at the time it said ‘progress’. Then someone showed it to the campaign team, and they asked if the word could be changed to 'hope', because rightwingers associate progressives with socialists. But it was never officially adopted by the campaign.”

Aung San Suu Kyi (2009)

“My friend Jack Healey, who used to run Amnesty, really liked the Obama poster, and in early 2009 he said: ‘You really should make a poster of Aung San Suu Kyi.’ I made 80,000 of these stickers, and 6,000 posters, and a lot of them were smuggled over to Burma. You never know how much influence anything has. So it was nice to meet her recently and hear her say that it was helpful.”

Love is the Drug (2012)

“Love is the Drug is inspired by the title of the Roxy Music song. I’m filtering it through the Orwellian definition of love, which is hate. If you look at the comments on every blog, there’s a lot of hate out there. People love to hate. So I’m really saying that hate is the drug. As much as I love people, it seems that the natural state of things is anger and jealousy and chaos.”

The Protester (2011)

“I really identified with the Occupy movement when it began. So when Time magazine came to me at the end of 2011 and said: ‘We’d like you to do our Person of the Year cover, which is about The Protester,' I only really wanted to do that if I could make as much about Occupy as possible. They sent me a lot of reference images and this photograph of [Occupy LA protester] Sarah Mason was really powerful.”

Chinese soldiers (2006)

“This is from 2006, a time when I was doing a lot of pro-peace images. I was very upset by the war in Iraq, so I started making images that were initially about hostility and juxtaposing them with peace symbols. This one is based on an image of two soldiers in Tiananmen Square. By putting the flower in the end of the gun, I was trying to say was that we should have peace guards rather than warriors. People always ask me: are you an activist? But I’ve just wrapped my activism into what I love to do, which is make pictures.”

It Takes the Sedation of Millions to Hold Us Back (2012)

“My new London show is inspired by music – and this one is inspired by one of my all-time favourite hip-hop albums, by Public Enemy. I was also influenced by Jasper Johns and his target images. It’s about people being obsessed with consumption rather than creation - anything that allows you to be passive and sedated rather than proactive.”

Obey Eye (2009)

“This is part of my Obey series. The idea was to make people look at adverts that are positioned as inviting, but might have a more sinister agenda. Advertising has the desired effect of obedience, but is packaged in a way that doesn’t directly say ‘Obey’. I wanted to pull the curtain back.”

You Don’t Need a Weatherman (2010)

“Music has always been a big inspiration for me, starting in the mid-80s with punk rock. Eventually my interests expanded to people like Bob Dylan, who showed how music could be used for social commentary. This image was about showing Dylan not as a pinup, but as a man who shied away from being perceived as a spokesman.”